me brings a wreath and finds
her poet dead.

Stephen Crane was a reincarnation of Frederic Chopin. Both were small in
stature, slight, fair-haired, and of that sensitive, acute, receptive
temperament--capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain.
Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the
hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away
and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun. Both were shrinking
yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for
love that earth could not requite. At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked
a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of children just out
of school seemed to hold the road. At other times--and this was the
prevailing mood--the manner was one of placid, patient, calm and smooth,
unruffled hope; but back and behind all was a dynamo of energy, a
brooding melancholy of unrest, and the crouching world-sorrow that would
not down.

Chopin reached sublimity through sweet sounds; Crane attained the same
heights through the sense of sight and words that symboled color, shapes
and scenes. In each the distinguishing feature is the intense
imagination and active sympathy. Knowledge consists in a sense of
values--of distinguishing this from that, for truth lies in the mass.
The delicate nuances of Chopin's music have never been equaled by
another composer; every note is cryptic, every sound a symbol. And yet
it is dance-music, too, but still it tells its story of baffled hope and
stifled desire--the tragedy of Poland in sweet sounds.

Stephen Crane was an artist in his ability to convey the feeling by just
the right word, or a word misplaced, like a lady's dress in disarray, or
a hat askew. This daring quality marks everything he wrote. The
recognition that language is fluid, and at best only an expedient,
flavors all his work. He makes no fetish of a grammar--if grammar gets
in the way, so much the worse for the grammar. All is packed with color,
and charged with feeling, yet the work is usually quiet in quality and
modest in manner.

Art is born of heart, not head; and so it seems to me that the work of
these men whose names I have somewhat arbitrarily linked, will live.
Each sowed in sorrow and reaped in grief. They were tender, kind,
gentle, with a capacity for love that passes the love of woman. They
were each indifferent to the proprieties, very much as children are.
They lived in cloister-lik